Philip Pocock
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Philip Pocock, born in Ottawa Canada, in 1954, is a photographer, painter, author and new media artist working collaboratively in the fields of Internet art and Installation art, as well as on the borders of photography, painting, drawing and art criticism.
In the early 1980s, Philip Pocock produced experimental Cibachrome Paintings and lyrical documentary photographs, most notable in a monograph
The Obvious Illusion, published by George Braziller with an introduction by Gregory Battcock.
In 1987 with painter John Zinsser, he co-founded The Journal of Contemporary Art.
Relocating to Cologne, Germany in 1990, he continued with his collaborative art practice, first painting and drawing with Walter Dahn under the label Music Security Administration.
In 1993, Philip Pocock's collaborative practise extended its digital beginnings at The Journal of Contemporary Art, and with Felix Stephan Huber he co-produced the Black Sea Diary for the Electronic Café at the Venice Biennale.
In 1994, Huber and Pocock set to work on the earliest Internet art work of its sort, a travel-as-art-as-information, cyber-roadmovie produced in Canada's Arctic becoming a reality in 1995 as Arctic Circle. With 9600 Baud modems, 12 MB RAM laptops and an old van, Huber and Pocock covered 11000 km or road and countless more on the Infobahn, digitizing, converting and uploading day-by-day video as well as writing and laying out webpages form the Internet from the road in a lost remote wilderness that converged with their being on an equally vast and remote cyber-road at one and the same time.
Along with the 1994 cyber-land-art work Arctic Circle, Philip Pocock was invited by documenta X in 1996 to produce a work in 1997. He assembled Felix Stephan Huber as well as Udo Noll and Florian Wenz for the first database-driven, hyper-cinematic Internet Art work which took them to the Equator in Uganda, Africa as well on the Java Sea in Indonesia in search of a new Equator,one of corresponding identities on-line, in A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands. Coded in PHP 1.0 and MSQL (the first public release of MySQL was also in 1996), database technology was for the first time applied to online interactive cinema. While Pocock and Wenz performed along the equator in Africa, online users were uploading scenes and stories of their own, sometimes connecting and at other times interrupting the general flow, creating a never-ending web of broken stories, much like life itself. Philip Pocock was also the guest Friday August 22nd 1997 in Philip Pocock, Documenta X 100 Days 100 Guests program. In 1999, with another group of collaborators and the support of the ZKM Center of Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, he produced h|u|m|b|o|t with further support from the Goethe Institute in Venezuela.
H|u|m|b|o|t is a movie-mapping, a single screen world drawn from a database of text and video, mapped onto a single screen-world with the help of a neural-net-like. self-organizing mapping algorithm developed by the Finnish mathematician, Teuvo Kohonen. The text source was primarily the 1799 travelogue from South America by Alexander von Humboldt. All chapters and paragraphs in his Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent were read and marked up with GPS, emotional and other markers. These markers were used to drive the screen mapping system. Video made by h|u|m|b|o|t collaborators including Roberto Cabot, Philip Pocock and Wolfgang Staehle in 1999, 200 years after Humboldt's journey, were integrated into the h|u|m|b|o|t map with the same marker system. This created a cinematic cyberatlas through which online guests travel, their tracks recorded and possibly watched by future online guests.
In 2002, with Axel Heide, Gregor Stehle and Onesandzeros, Philip Pocock produced UNMOVIE for Future Cinema at ZKM Karlsruhe. On the Unmovie Stage, five actor-media or 'bots' avoid one another, or search out, dock, talk and listen to one another, sometimes conversing in various groupings along with on-line guests. The on-going script produced on the Unmovie Stage drives an endless Stream of anonymous net-video, by keywords attributed them by UNMOVIE authors. These keywords in effect are a second script, and define the logic and poetry of the cuts assembling the Unmovie Stream. When words are repeated adequately by the bots in conversation on the Unmovie Stage, they cull in turn playlists of videos from the database for the Unmovie Stream. This has been happening 24 hours a day 7 days a year since 10 November 2002.
These Internet-based works have been presented in major museums on several continents since 1999, most often as larger-scale, collaborative installation pieces.
Venues have included the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and St. Etienne, France; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; ICC Tokyo, Japan; Galerie Oboro Montreal and Walter Phillips Gallery Banff Center, Canada; Wood Street Galleries Pittsburgh, USA; World Wide Video Festival, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands.
In 2006, Philip Pocock created SpacePlace :: Art in the Age of Orbitization with Peter Weibel and Axel Heide, Onesandzeros and Heiko Hoos. As well as being an on-line Web2 [Mashup (web application hybrid)] and repository for Orbital and Space-related art and culture, the SpacePlace database generated a mobile text, image and video platform SpacePlace mobile, as well as a dual-screen, free public access Bluetooth installation for specific locations, such as ZKMax, Munich, Germany, which opened June 7, 2006, the day the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs convened in Vienna for a conference to discuss the Peaceful and Cultural Utilization of Near Earth Orbit and beyond. In 2007, with students, datatects, artists and researchers, Philip Pocock directed the production of two participatory media installations presented at the YOU_ser: The Century of the Consumer exhibition curated by Peter Weibel at ZKM Karlsruhe. One entitled YOUniverse Moblog allows museum guests to upload photos from their mobile phones to a 'satellite' sculpture. and compile a short clip of 'visually similar' photos culled from obscure Web2.0 photo-sharing portals. The other ZKM Island in Second Life presents Vitrine Architecture in Second Life, each a gallery in which video and media streams take place, as well as a Boxing Ring where 6 German cultural theorists and philosophers playfully punch it out while they wax philosophy on ZKM Island in Second Life.
Collaborative Internet Works include:
1995 Arctic Circle
1997 A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands
1999 h|u|m|b|o|t
2002 UNMOVIE
2005 Datatecture
2006 SpacePlace SpacePlace mobile
2007 YOUniverse Moblog
